Friday, September 7, 2007

Hall of Shame, Episode 1

I'm still getting settled in to my new locale, but I've started playing chess locally and getting back into the groove.

The following position is from a casual but slow game, which was a grueling, back-and-forth, positional struggle. I am relying on my memory here, since regrettably I did not keep score:



I am playing Black. I decided to dart across enemy fire to bring my king to the defense on the kingside. I had calculated that the pawn endgame after 1... Ke5 2. Re1+ Kf6 3. Rxe7 Kxe7 should at least be a draw. However, there are two major flaws with this sequence. My opponent found the lesser of the two rebuttals (which was enough for me to immediately resign) but missed the best response.

Try to find the two biggest flaws with my intended sequence. Using a chess engine is gauche.

I'll post the answers later.

3 comments:

David Glickman said...

I suspect your opponent played 1...Ke5 2.Re1+ Kf6 3.g5+! winning the rook. However, even better is 1...Ke5 2.Ke3!! with Rf5++ next.

Grandpatzer said...

dg: exactamundo. My opponent's deflection was cute enough, but the mate in two is surprising because of the "quiet" and unforcing first move.

Ryan said...

Hi Grandpatzer. I'm working through my rss feeds of my favourite blogs now that I'm back on-line after moving house and liked this one. I missed the mate in 2 as well.

I guess that we are all so used to looking at forcing moves (checks, captures threats as the drill goes, that we often miss this sort of thing.